We climbed. It had been too long since we had done this: too many days, weeks, months of living in our minds, far from earth and air. I had nearly forgotten.

My son and I made our way west to the hills, the small towns and the pastures, remembering a time when life was sweeter, simpler perhaps. But then again, no. It just feels that way when you look back in time. You forget the complications that filled the days and remember every moment in just one glorious moment, a boy holding berries in a bowl on a clear Vermont summer day, and you think that this is what life always was back then. You forget the times the electricity going out for days at a time, and the fleas that bit your ankles, and the dirt and the manure spreaders and the people at the town hall who mocked you privately–not so privately–because you were not one of them. You forget the dishes and the laundry and the clutter on the dining room table and the emails, and life becomes nothing but a berry tart cooling on the back porch. It was all right then, all right to be a little different, all right to let the bread rise and to have this life this wonderful life of clear days and berries and little boys.

And little boys grow up. They do! Right before your eyes they grow up and become little men, or big boys, and some days the difference between the two seems enormous; some days it hardly matters. And when we are hiking in the woods up a mountain, it does not matter at all. We are hiking, and the bugs are fierce, so we do not make it to the summit. It is humid, if not hot, and the sweat is sticking to our backs as we make our way through the woods, higher in the green wildness, sweeter still by the faint smell of lilacs, or clover. Oh yes, this I had forgotten, this sensual journey in life, these days now of the best things we find on this earth.

We climbed Mount Greylock yesterday, not to the summit. But we climbed. Then we drove. We stuck our heads out the windows, and looked at the hills, green hills, hills with cows and limestone and ponds. We drove, crossed back up into Brattleboro, across to Keene, and then back down, down toward home, slowly, slowly finding our way through this state, this state where we truly can drive one direction for two hours to find mountains, another direction to find the ocean. We passed the deer crossing, the duck crossing, the bear crossing, and saw none of those animals, but crossed beavers, cormorants, pileated woodpeckers, wrens, and finally, close to home, our friendly heron. And then we found home, a porch and iced green tea. And in the evening I sank into my bath, hills still in my mind clearly then as sleep sank into me, moments to remember, later, when enough time has passed for my mind to play tricks on me, when I remember only the things that really mattered.